The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps
Ukraine Fight Putin
For more than a decade, the United States has nurtured
a secret intelligence partnership with Ukraine that is now critical for both
countries in countering Russia.
Adam Entous
Michael Schwirtz
By Adam
Entous and Michael Schwirtz
Adam Entous
and Michael Schwirtz conducted more than 200 interviews in Ukraine, several
other European countries and the United States to report this story.
Feb. 25,
2024
Nestled in
a dense forest, the Ukrainian military base appears abandoned and destroyed,
its command center a burned-out husk, a casualty of a Russian missile barrage
early in the war.
But that is
above ground.
Not far
away, a discreet passageway descends to a subterranean bunker where teams of
Ukrainian soldiers track Russian spy satellites and eavesdrop on conversations
between Russian commanders. On one screen, a red line followed the route of an
explosive drone threading through Russian air defenses from a point in central
Ukraine to a target in the Russian city of Rostov.
The
underground bunker, built to replace the destroyed command center in the months
after Russia’s invasion, is a secret nerve center of Ukraine’s military.
There is
also one more secret: The base is almost fully financed, and partly equipped,
by the C.I.A.
“One
hundred and ten percent,” Gen. Serhii Dvoretskiy, a top intelligence commander,
said in an interview at the base.
Now
entering the third year of a war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of
lives, the intelligence partnership between Washington and Kyiv is a linchpin
of Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. The C.I.A. and other American
intelligence agencies provide intelligence for targeted missile strikes, track
Russian troop movements and help support spy networks.
But the
partnership is no wartime creation, nor is Ukraine the only beneficiary.
It took
root a decade ago, coming together in fits and starts under three very
different U.S. presidents, pushed forward by key individuals who often took
daring risks. It has transformed Ukraine, whose intelligence agencies were long
seen as thoroughly compromised by Russia, into one of Washington’s most
important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today.
The
listening post in the Ukrainian forest is part of a C.I.A.-supported network of
spy bases constructed in the past eight years that includes 12 secret locations
along the Russian border. Before the war, the Ukrainians proved themselves to
the Americans by collecting intercepts that helped prove Russia’s involvement
in the 2014 downing of a commercial jetliner, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The
Ukrainians also helped the Americans go after the Russian operatives who
meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Around
2016, the C.I.A. began training an elite Ukrainian commando force — known as
Unit 2245 — which captured Russian drones and communications gear so that
C.I.A. technicians could reverse-engineer them and crack Moscow’s encryption
systems. (One officer in the unit was Kyrylo Budanov, now the general leading
Ukraine’s military intelligence.)
And the
C.I.A. also helped train a new generation of Ukrainian spies who operated
inside Russia, across Europe, and in Cuba and other places where the Russians
have a large presence.
The
relationship is so ingrained that C.I.A. officers remained at a remote location
in western Ukraine when the Biden administration evacuated U.S. personnel in
the weeks before Russia invaded in February 2022. During the invasion, the
officers relayed critical intelligence, including where Russia was planning
strikes and which weapons systems they would use.
“Without
them, there would have been no way for us to resist the Russians, or to beat
them,” said Ivan Bakanov, who was then head of Ukraine’s domestic intelligence
agency, the S.B.U.
The details
of this intelligence partnership, many of which are being disclosed by The New
York Times for the first time, have been a closely guarded secret for a decade.
In more
than 200 interviews, current and former officials in Ukraine, the United States
and Europe described a partnership that nearly foundered from mutual distrust
before it steadily expanded, turning Ukraine into an intelligence-gathering hub
that intercepted more Russian communications than the C.I.A. station in Kyiv
could initially handle. Many of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity
to discuss intelligence and matters of sensitive diplomacy.
Now these
intelligence networks are more important than ever, as Russia is on the
offensive and Ukraine is more dependent on sabotage and long-range missile
strikes that require spies far behind enemy lines. And they are increasingly at
risk: If Republicans in Congress end military funding to Kyiv, the C.I.A. may
have to scale back.
To try to
reassure Ukrainian leaders, William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, made a
secret visit to Ukraine last Thursday, his 10th visit since the invasion.
From the
outset, a shared adversary — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — brought
the C.I.A. and its Ukrainian partners together. Obsessed with “losing” Ukraine
to the West, Mr. Putin had regularly interfered in Ukraine’s political system,
handpicking leaders he believed would keep Ukraine within Russia’s orbit, yet
each time it backfired, driving protesters into the streets.
Mr. Putin
has long blamed Western intelligence agencies for manipulating Kyiv and sowing
anti-Russia sentiment in Ukraine.
Toward the
end of 2021, according to a senior European official, Mr. Putin was weighing
whether to launch his full-scale invasion when he met with the head of one of
Russia’s main spy services, who told him that the C.I.A., together with
Britain’s MI6, were controlling Ukraine and turning it into a beachhead for
operations against Moscow.
But the
Times investigation found that Mr. Putin and his advisers misread a critical
dynamic. The C.I.A. didn’t push its way into Ukraine. U.S. officials were often
reluctant to fully engage, fearing that Ukrainian officials could not be
trusted, and worrying about provoking the Kremlin.
Yet a tight
circle of Ukrainian intelligence officials assiduously courted the C.I.A. and
gradually made themselves vital to the Americans. In 2015, Gen. Valeriy
Kondratiuk, then Ukraine’s head of military intelligence, arrived at a meeting
with the C.I.A.’s deputy station chief and without warning handed over a stack
of top-secret files.
That
initial tranche contained secrets about the Russian Navy’s Northern Fleet,
including detailed information about the latest Russian nuclear submarine
designs. Before long, teams of C.I.A. officers were regularly leaving his
office with backpacks full of documents.
“We
understood that we needed to create the conditions of trust,” General
Kondratiuk said.
As the
partnership deepened after 2016, the Ukrainians became impatient with what they
considered Washington’s undue caution, and began staging assassinations and
other lethal operations, which violated the terms the White House thought the
Ukrainians had agreed to. Infuriated, officials in Washington threatened to cut
off support, but they never did.
“The
relationships only got stronger and stronger because both sides saw value in
it, and the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv — our station there, the operation out of
Ukraine — became the best source of information, signals and everything else,
on Russia,” said a former senior American official. “We couldn’t get enough of
it.”
This is the
untold story of how it all happened.
A Cautious Beginning
The
C.I.A.’s partnership in Ukraine can be traced back to two phone calls on the
night of Feb. 24, 2014, eight years to the day before Russia’s full-scale
invasion.
Millions of
Ukrainians had just overrun the country’s pro-Kremlin government and the
president, Viktor Yanukovych, and his spy chiefs had fled to Russia. In the
tumult, a fragile pro-Western government quickly took power.
The
government’s new spy chief, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, arrived at the headquarters
of the domestic intelligence agency and found a pile of smoldering documents in
the courtyard. Inside, many of the computers had been wiped or were infected
with Russian malware.
“It was
empty. No lights. No leadership. Nobody was there,” Mr. Nalyvaichenko said in
an interview.
He went to
an office and called the C.I.A. station chief and the local head of MI6. It was
near midnight but he summoned them to the building, asked for help in
rebuilding the agency from the ground up, and proposed a three-way partnership.
“That’s how it all started,” Mr. Nalyvaichenko said.
The
situation quickly became more dangerous. Mr. Putin seized Crimea. His agents
fomented separatist rebellions that would become a war in the country’s east.
Ukraine was on war footing, and Mr. Nalyvaichenko appealed to the C.I.A. for
overhead imagery and other intelligence to help defend its territory.
With
violence escalating, an unmarked U.S. government plane touched down at an
airport in Kyiv carrying John O. Brennan, then the director of the C.I.A. He
told Mr. Nalyvaichenko that the C.I.A. was interested in developing a
relationship but only at a pace the agency was comfortable with, according to
U.S. and Ukrainian officials.
To the
C.I.A., the unknown question was how long Mr. Nalyvaichenko and the pro-Western
government would be around. The C.I.A. had been burned before in Ukraine.
Following
the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine gained independence and then
veered between competing political forces: those that wanted to remain close to
Moscow and those that wanted to align with the West. During a previous stint as
spy chief, Mr. Nalyvaichenko started a similar partnership with the C.I.A.,
which dissolved when the country swung back toward Russia.
Now Mr.
Brennan explained that to unlock C.I.A. assistance the Ukrainians had to prove
that they could provide intelligence of value to the Americans. They also
needed to purge Russian spies; the domestic spy agency, the S.B.U., was riddled
with them. (Case in point: The Russians quickly learned about Mr. Brennan’s
supposedly secret visit. The Kremlin’s propaganda outlets published a
photoshopped image of the C.I.A. director wearing a clown wig and makeup.)
Mr. Brennan
returned to Washington, where advisers to President Barack Obama were deeply
concerned about provoking Moscow. The White House crafted secret rules that
infuriated the Ukrainians and that some inside the C.I.A. thought of as
handcuffs. The rules barred intelligence agencies from providing any support to
Ukraine that could be “reasonably expected” to have lethal consequences.
The result
was a delicate balancing act. The C.I.A. was supposed to strengthen Ukraine’s
intelligence agencies without provoking the Russians. The red lines were never
precisely clear, which created a persistent tension in the partnership.
In Kyiv,
Mr. Nalyvaichenko picked a longtime aide, General Kondratiuk, to serve as head
of counterintelligence, and they created a new paramilitary unit that was
deployed behind enemy lines to conduct operations and gather intelligence that
the C.I.A. or MI6 would not provide to them.
Known as
the Fifth Directorate, this unit would be filled with officers born after
Ukraine gained independence.
“They had
no connection with Russia,” General Kondratiuk said. “They didn’t even know
what the Soviet Union was.”
That
summer, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur,
blew up in midair and crashed in eastern Ukraine, killing nearly 300 passengers
and crew. The Fifth Directorate produced telephone intercepts and other
intelligence within hours of the crash that quickly placed responsibility on
Russian-backed separatists.
The C.I.A.
was impressed, and made its first meaningful commitment by providing secure
communications gear and specialized training to members of the Fifth
Directorate and two other elite units.
“The
Ukrainians wanted fish and we, for policy reasons, couldn’t deliver that fish,”
said a former U.S. official, referring to intelligence that could help them
battle the Russians. “But we were happy to teach them how to fish and deliver
fly-fishing equipment.”
A Secret Santa
In the
summer of 2015, Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, shook up the domestic
service and installed an ally to replace Mr. Nalyvaichenko, the C.I.A.’s
trusted partner. But the change created an opportunity elsewhere.
In the
reshuffle, General Kondratiuk was appointed as the head of the country’s
military intelligence agency, known as the HUR, where years earlier he had
started his career. It would be an early example of how personal ties, more
than policy shifts, would deepen the C.I.A.’s involvement in Ukraine.
Unlike the
domestic agency, the HUR had the authority to collect intelligence outside the
country, including in Russia. But the Americans had seen little value in
cultivating the agency because it wasn’t producing any intelligence of value on
the Russians — and because it was seen as a bastion of Russian sympathizers.
Trying to
build trust, General Kondratiuk arranged a meeting with his American
counterpart at the Defense Intelligence Agency and handed over a stack of
secret Russian documents. But senior D.I.A. officials were suspicious and
discouraged building closer ties.
The general
needed to find a more willing partner.
Months
earlier, while still with the domestic agency, General Kondratiuk visited the
C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va. In those meetings, he met a C.I.A. officer
with a jolly demeanor and a bushy beard who had been tapped to become the next
station chief in Kyiv.
After a
long day of meetings, the C.I.A. took General Kondratiuk to a Washington
Capitals hockey match, where he and the incoming station chief sat in a luxury
box and loudly booed Alex Ovechkin, the team’s star player from Russia.
The station
chief had not yet arrived when General Kondratiuk handed over to the C.I.A. the
secret documents about the Russian Navy. “There’s more where this came from,”
he promised, and the documents were sent off to analysts in Langley.
The
analysts concluded the documents were authentic, and after the station chief
arrived in Kyiv, the C.I.A. became General Kondratiuk’s primary partner.
General
Kondratiuk knew he needed the C.I.A. to strengthen his own agency. The C.I.A.
thought the general might be able to help Langley, too. It struggled to recruit
spies inside Russia because its case officers were under heavy surveillance.
“For a
Russian, allowing oneself to be recruited by an American is to commit the
absolute, ultimate in treachery and treason,” General Kondratiuk said. “But for
a Russian to be recruited by a Ukrainian, it’s just friends talking over a
beer.”
The new
station chief began regularly visiting General Kondratiuk, whose office was
decorated with an aquarium where yellow and blue fish — the national colors of
Ukraine — swam circles around a model of a sunken Russian submarine. The two
men became close, which drove the relationship between the two agencies, and
the Ukrainians gave the new station chief an affectionate nickname: Santa
Claus.
In January
2016, General Kondratiuk flew to Washington for meetings at Scattergood, an
estate on the C.I.A. campus in Virginia where the agency often fetes visiting
dignitaries. The agency agreed to help the HUR modernize, and to improve its
ability to intercept Russian military communications. In exchange, General
Kondratiuk agreed to share all of the raw intelligence with the Americans.
Now the
partnership was real.
Operation Goldfish
Today, the
narrow road leading to the secret base is framed by minefields, seeded as a
line of defense in the weeks after Russia’s invasion. The Russian missiles that
hit the base had seemingly shut it down, but just weeks later the Ukrainians
returned.
With money
and equipment provided by the C.I.A., crews under General Dvoretskiy’s command
began to rebuild, but underground. To avoid detection, they only worked at
night and when Russian spy satellites were not overhead. Workers also parked
their cars a distance away from the construction site.
In the
bunker, General Dvoretskiy pointed to communications equipment and large
computer servers, some of which were financed by the C.I.A. He said his teams
were using the base to hack into the Russian military’s secure communications
networks.
“This is
the thing that breaks into satellites and decodes secret conversations,”
General Dvoretskiy told a Times journalist on a tour, adding that they were
hacking into spy satellites from China and Belarus, too.
Another
officer placed two recently produced maps on a table, as evidence of how
Ukraine is tracking Russian activity around the world.
The first
showed the overhead routes of Russian spy satellites traveling over central
Ukraine. The second showed how Russian spy satellites are passing over
strategic military installations — including a nuclear weapons facility — in
the eastern and central United States.
The C.I.A.
began sending equipment in 2016, after the pivotal meeting at Scattergood,
General Dvoretskiy said, providing encrypted radios and devices for
intercepting secret enemy communications.
Beyond the
base, the C.I.A. also oversaw a training program, carried out in two European
cities, to teach Ukrainian intelligence officers how to convincingly assume
fake personas and steal secrets in Russia and other countries that are adept at
rooting out spies. The program was called Operation Goldfish, which derived
from a joke about a Russian-speaking goldfish who offers two Estonians wishes
in exchange for its freedom.
The
punchline was that one of the Estonians bashed the fish’s head with a rock,
explaining that anything speaking Russian could not be trusted.
The
Operation Goldfish officers were soon deployed to 12 newly-built, forward
operating bases constructed along the Russian border. From each base, General
Kondratiuk said, the Ukrainian officers ran networks of agents who gathered
intelligence inside Russia.
C.I.A.
officers installed equipment at the bases to help gather intelligence and also
identified some of the most skilled Ukrainian graduates of the Operation
Goldfish program, working with them to approach potential Russian sources.
These graduates then trained sleeper agents on Ukrainian territory meant to
launch guerrilla operations in case of occupation.
It can
often take years for the C.I.A. to develop enough trust in a foreign agency to
begin conducting joint operations. With the Ukrainians it had taken less than
six months. The new partnership started producing so much raw intelligence
about Russia that it had to be shipped to Langley for processing.
But the
C.I.A. did have red lines. It wouldn’t help the Ukrainians conduct offensive
lethal operations.
“We made a
distinction between intelligence collection operations and things that go
boom,” a former senior U.S. official said.
‘This is Our Country’
It was a
distinction that grated on the Ukrainians.
First,
General Kondratiuk was annoyed when the Americans refused to provide satellite
images from inside Russia. Soon after, he requested C.I.A. assistance in
planning a clandestine mission to send HUR commandos into Russia to plant
explosive devices at train depots used by the Russian military. If the Russian
military sought to take more Ukrainian territory, Ukrainians could detonate the
explosives to slow the Russian advance.
When the
station chief briefed his superiors, they “lost their minds,” as one former
official put it. Mr. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, called General Kondratiuk to
make certain that mission was canceled and that Ukraine abided by the red lines
forbidding lethal operations.
General
Kondratiuk canceled the mission, but he also took a different lesson. “Going
forward, we worked to not have discussions about these things with your guys,”
he said.
Late that
summer, Ukrainian spies discovered that Russian forces were deploying attack
helicopters at an airfield on the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula, possibly
to stage a surprise attack.
General
Kondratiuk decided to send a team into Crimea to plant explosives at the
airfield so they could be detonated if Russia moved to attack.
This time,
he didn’t ask the C.I.A. for permission. He turned to Unit 2245, the commando
force that received specialized military training from the C.I.A.’s elite
paramilitary group, known as the Ground Department. The intent of the training
was to teach defensive techniques, but C.I.A. officers understood that without
their knowledge the Ukrainians could use the same techniques in offensive
lethal operations.
At the
time, the future head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, General
Budanov, was a rising star in Unit 2245. He was known for daring operations
behind enemy lines and had deep ties to the C.I.A. The agency had trained him
and also taken the extraordinary step of sending him for rehabilitation to
Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland after he was shot in
the right arm during fighting in the Donbas.
Disguised
in Russian uniforms, then-Lt. Col. Budanov led commandos across a narrow gulf
in inflatable speedboats, landing at night in Crimea.
But an
elite Russian commando unit was waiting for them. The Ukrainians fought back,
killing several Russian fighters, including the son of a general, before
retreating to the shoreline, plunging into the sea and swimming for hours to
Ukrainian-controlled territory.
It was a
disaster. In a public address, President Putin accused the Ukrainians of
plotting a terrorist attack and promised to avenge the deaths of the Russian
fighters.
“There is
no doubt that we will not let these things pass,” he said.
In
Washington, the Obama White House was livid. Joseph R. Biden Jr., then the vice
president and a champion of assistance to Ukraine, called Ukraine’s president
to angrily complain.
“It causes
a gigantic problem,” Mr. Biden said in the call, a recording of which was
leaked and published online. “All I’m telling you as a friend is that my making
arguments here is a hell of a lot harder now.”
Some of Mr.
Obama’s advisers wanted to shut the C.I.A. program down, but Mr. Brennan
persuaded them that doing so would be self-defeating, given the relationship
was starting to produce intelligence on the Russians as the C.I.A. was
investigating Russian election meddling.
Mr. Brennan
got on the phone with General Kondratiuk to again emphasize the red lines.
The general
was upset. “This is our country,” he responded, according to a colleague. “It’s
our war, and we’ve got to fight.”
The
blowback from Washington cost General Kondratiuk his job. But Ukraine didn’t
back down.
Police
officials examining the wreckage of Maksym Shapoval’s car after he was killed
in an explosion in Kyiv, in 2017.Credit...Sergii Kharchenko/Pacific Press, via
LightRocket, via Getty Images
One day
after General Kondratiuk was removed, a mysterious explosion in the
Russian-occupied city of Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, ripped through an
elevator carrying a senior Russian separatist commander named Arsen Pavlov,
known by his nom de guerre, Motorola.
The C.I.A.
soon learned that the assassins were members of the Fifth Directorate, the spy
group that received C.I.A. training. Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency had
even handed out commemorative patches to those involved, each one stitched with
the word “Lift,” the British term for an elevator.
Again, some
of Mr. Obama’s advisers were furious, but they were lame ducks — the
presidential election pitting Donald J. Trump against Hillary Rodham Clinton
was three weeks away — and the assassinations continued.
A team of
Ukrainian agents set up an unmanned, shoulder-fired rocket launcher in a
building in the occupied territories. It was directly across from the office of
a rebel commander named Mikhail Tolstykh, better known as Givi. Using a remote
trigger, they fired the launcher as soon as Givi entered his office, killing
him, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.
A shadow
war was now in overdrive. The Russians used a car bomb to assassinate the head
of Unit 2245, the elite Ukrainian commando force. The commander, Col. Maksim
Shapoval, was on his way to meeting with C.I.A. officers in Kyiv when his car
exploded.
At the
colonel’s wake, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, stood in
mourning beside the C.I.A. station chief. Later, C.I.A. officers and their
Ukrainian counterparts toasted Colonel Shapoval with whiskey shots.
“For all of
us,” General Kondratiuk said, “it was a blow.”
Tiptoeing Around Trump
The
election of Mr. Trump in November 2016 put the Ukrainians and their C.I.A.
partners on edge.
Mr. Trump
praised Mr. Putin and dismissed Russia’s role in election interference. He was
suspicious of Ukraine and later tried to pressure its president, Volodymyr
Zelensky, to investigate his Democratic rival, Mr. Biden, resulting in Mr.
Trump’s first impeachment.
But
whatever Mr. Trump said and did, his administration often went in the other
direction. This is because Mr. Trump had put Russia hawks in key positions,
including Mike Pompeo as C.I.A. director and John Bolton as national security
adviser. They visited Kyiv to underline their full support for the secret
partnership, which expanded to include more specialized training programs and
the building of additional secret bases.
The base in
the forest grew to include a new command center and barracks, and swelled from
80 to 800 Ukrainian intelligence officers. Preventing Russia from interfering
in future U.S. elections was a top C.I.A. priority during this period, and
Ukrainian and American intelligence officers joined forces to probe the
computer systems of Russia’s intelligence agencies to identify operatives
trying to manipulate voters.
In one
joint operation, a HUR team duped an officer from Russia’s military
intelligence service into providing information that allowed the C.I.A. to
connect Russia’s government to the so-called Fancy Bear hacking group, which
had been linked to election interference efforts in a number of countries.
General
Budanov, whom Mr. Zelensky tapped to lead the HUR in 2020, said of the
partnership: “It only strengthened. It grew systematically. The cooperation
expanded to additional spheres and became more large-scale.”
The
relationship was so successful that the C.I.A. wanted to replicate it with
other European intelligence services that shared a focus in countering Russia.
The head of
Russia House, the C.I.A. department overseeing operations against Russia,
organized a secret meeting at The Hague. There, representatives from the
C.I.A., Britain’s MI6, the HUR, the Dutch service (a critical intelligence
ally) and other agencies agreed to start pooling together more of their
intelligence on Russia.
The result
was a secret coalition against Russia — and the Ukrainians were vital members
of it.
March to War
In March
2021, the Russian military started massing troops along the border with
Ukraine. As the months passed, and more troops encircled the country, the
question was whether Mr. Putin was making a feint or preparing for war.
That
November, and in the weeks that followed, the C.I.A. and MI6 delivered a
unified message to their Ukrainian partners: Russia was preparing for a
full-scale invasion to decapitate the government and install a puppet in Kyiv
who would do the Kremlin’s bidding.
U.S. and
British intelligence agencies had intercepts that Ukrainian intelligence
agencies did not have access to, according to U.S. officials. The new
intelligence listed the names of Ukrainian officials whom the Russians were
planning to kill or capture, as well as the Ukrainians the Kremlin hoped to
install in power.
President
Zelensky and some of his top advisers appeared unconvinced, even after Mr.
Burns, the C.I.A. director, rushed to Kyiv in January 2022 to brief them.
As the
Russian invasion neared, C.I.A. and MI6 officers made final visits in Kyiv with
their Ukrainian peers. One of the M16 officers teared up in front of the
Ukrainians, out of concern that the Russians would kill them.
At Mr.
Burns’s urging, a small group of C.I.A. officers were exempted from the broader
U.S. evacuation and were relocated to a hotel complex in western Ukraine. They
didn’t want to desert their partners.
No Endgame
After Mr.
Putin launched the invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the C.I.A. officers at the hotel
were the only U.S. government presence on the ground. Every day at the hotel,
they met with their Ukrainian contacts to pass information. The old handcuffs
were off, and the Biden White House authorized spy agencies to provide
intelligence support for lethal operations against Russian forces on Ukrainian
soil.
Often, the
C.I.A. briefings contained shockingly specific details.
On March 3,
2022 — the eighth day of the war — the C.I.A. team gave a precise overview of
Russian plans for the coming two weeks. The Russians would open a humanitarian
corridor out of the besieged city of Mariupol that same day, and then open fire
on the Ukrainians who used it.
The
Russians planned to encircle the strategic port city of Odesa, according to the
C.I.A., but a storm delayed the assault and the Russians never took the city.
Then, on March 10, the Russians intended to bombard six Ukrainian cities, and
had already entered coordinates into cruise missiles for those strikes.
The
Russians also were trying to assassinate top Ukrainian officials, including Mr.
Zelensky. In at least one case, the C.I.A. shared intelligence with Ukraine’s
domestic agency that helped disrupt a plot against the president, according to
a senior Ukrainian official.
When the
Russian assault on Kyiv had stalled, the C.I.A. station chief rejoiced and told
his Ukrainian counterparts that they were “punching the Russians in the face,”
according to a Ukrainian officer who was in the room.
Within
weeks, the C.I.A. had returned to Kyiv, and the agency sent in scores of new
officers to help the Ukrainians. A senior U.S. official said of the C.I.A.’s
sizable presence, “Are they pulling triggers? No. Are they helping with
targeting? Absolutely.”
Some of the
C.I.A. officers were deployed to Ukrainian bases. They reviewed lists of
potential Russian targets that the Ukrainians were preparing to strike,
comparing the information that the Ukrainians had with U.S. intelligence to
ensure that it was accurate.
Before the
invasion, the C.I.A. and MI6 had trained their Ukrainian counterparts on
recruiting sources, and building clandestine and partisan networks. In the
southern Kherson region, which was occupied by Russia in the first weeks of the
war, those partisan networks sprang into action, according to General
Kondratiuk, assassinating local collaborators and helping Ukrainian forces
target Russian positions.
In July
2022, Ukrainian spies saw Russian convoys preparing to cross a strategic bridge
across the Dnipro river and notified MI6. British and American intelligence
officers then quickly verified the Ukrainian intelligence, using real-time
satellite imagery. MI6 relayed the confirmation, and the Ukrainian military
opened fire with rockets, destroying the convoys.
At the
underground bunker, General Dvoretskiy said a German antiaircraft system now
defends against Russian attacks. An air-filtration system guards against
chemical weapons and a dedicated power system is available, if the power grid
goes down.
The
question that some Ukrainian intelligence officers are now asking their
American counterparts — as Republicans in the House weigh whether to cut off
billions of dollars in aid — is whether the C.I.A. will abandon them. “It
happened in Afghanistan before and now it’s going to happen in Ukraine,” a
senior Ukrainian officer said.
Referring
to Mr. Burns’s visit to Kyiv last week, a C.I.A. official said, “We have
demonstrated a clear commitment to Ukraine over many years and this visit was
another strong signal that the U.S. commitment will continue.”
The C.I.A.
and the HUR have built two other secret bases to intercept Russian
communications, and combined with the 12 forward operating bases, which General
Kondratiuk says are still operational, the HUR now collects and produces more
intelligence than at any time in the war — much of which it shares with the
C.I.A.
“You can’t
get information like this anywhere — except here, and now,” General Dvoretskiy
said.
Natalia
Yermak contributed reporting.
Adam Entous
is a Washington-based investigative correspondent and a two-time Pulitzer Prize
winner. Before joining the Washington bureau of The Times, he covered
intelligence, national security and foreign policy for The New Yorker magazine,
The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. More about Adam Entous
Michael
Schwirtz is an investigative reporter with the International desk. With The
Times since 2006, he previously covered the countries of the former Soviet
Union from Moscow and was a lead reporter on a team that won the 2020 Pulitzer
Prize for articles about Russian intelligence operations. More
about Michael Schwirtz
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